The Ant and the Boot

I don’t think the kid slept that night. Hell, I sure didn’t. We got back on earth and even though we were dead exhausted we all just lied there, too shit-scared to fall asleep. Point Break and the Captain paced back and forth and Banner rested against the wall, nervously spinning a cup in his hands with his eyes closed. Natasha stood staring out the window, Agent Barton standing next to her. I lounged on the couch, trying to close my eyes, but no matter how heavy they were I couldn’t keep them closed. Dove remained pressed into the shadows, wrapped tightly in a blanket with an expression laced with worry. She got up partway through the night and walked outside, but returned only a few minutes later. I could understand that; half the time I didn’t know if I should stay or if I should go either.

None of us said anything. Not a single word. Pepper was gone, off representing Stark Industries at a meeting in D.C. She hadn’t expected me back for another couple of days. She would probably be home in a few hours, sometime when the sun came up, but we had a few hours to go yet.

“Anyone want a drink?” I asked, looking around. I couldn’t stay still anymore.

“I would,” Dove replied almost immediately. “Something strong, please.”

I gave drinks to everyone, even those who didn’t ask. They’d want them. I sat down on the couch, staring blankly ahead of me with the glass still cold in my hand. I drank. It didn’t taste as good as usual, but I finished it anyway. I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come.

“I’m going to go flying,” Dove said sometime just before dawn.

“Mark 13 is downstairs.”

“I don’t need the Mark 13 anymore, Tony.”

I glanced up at her. My exhaustion was showing. I had forgotten what she was now: superhuman. A god.

I nodded and let her go. She vanished into the sky, bright blue immersing her body until she was airborne.

“We have another god among us,” Natasha said calmly, watching her go.

“Tony, how close is she to Loki?” the Captain – Steve, I guess – asked.

“What?”

“Loki’s our enemy. We need to know if we can trust her.”

“It doesn’t matter how she feels for him. She can make the hard decisions,” Natasha said coldly, looking at Steve.

“How can you know that?”

“Women’s intuition.”

“Don’t expect her to hurt him, though,” I added, shooting a glance in Natasha’s direction. “I don’t know what the hell she feels for him, but whatever it is it’s strong enough to paralyze her.”

“She wasn’t paralyzed tonight.”

“She wasn’t fighting Loki.”

Natasha looked at me, hard. She didn’t like our point, and she didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t refute it even more. She believed in the girl. I patted her on the back and she bristled, as if I’d slapped her or something.

“She’ll do fine, Natasha. This is just tough.”

“You don’t think she’ll turn, do you?” Steve asked. He leaned against a wall, folding his arms.

“No. She won’t. I’ll put money on that.”

But even as I said it my throat went dry, because even though I was sure she would stay I still had to wonder. I wondered because I had heard what they hadn’t: I had heard her tell Loki she loved him.

But I also heard her plead with him and watch him walk away. And, more importantly, I had heard him tell her he loved her first. That was a weapon we could use to our advantage.



My scepter glowed with life as I fed it a portion of the Tesseract. It seemed to hum with its own energy, the small cube consumed into the scepter’s original blue light. Now we, too, had broken the Tesseract, as the Avengers had done. Two pieces given to their champion and two given to ours. Now the Tesseract itself would be bowed under the weight of my will as well as Dove’s, our joint presences pulling it this way and that.

“We don’t have enough power, Loki.”

Thanos paced back and forth while I sat, watching his movements. He was angry. Very angry. He had already slain two Chitauri minions as we had been standing here and a third was cowering back away from him. I held my scepter casually in my hand, but in truth my knuckles were tight around its hilt.

“We have half the Tesseract so far. The other half should be easy enough to steal back from S.H.I.E.L.D.,” I assured. He shook his head.

“That is not what I mean, Loki. We need the Tesseract to possess all of its power. Without all of its pieces it is not even half as potent. Don’t you feel your power slipping between your fingers?”

I did. My power, though strongly present, was limited. When I had held the Tesseract the first time I had felt that my power stretched on into infinity, like an endless well that I could draw upon. I was still dangerous, but I knew that eventually my strength could run out.

“Yes, I feel it.”

“We need her, Loki.”

Dove. My lover, my wife. My queen. My mind still hadn’t wrapped itself around the idea that she was immortal now, as I was. But this was good, not bad: now we could live together into eternity, never feeling the sting of age or the separation of death.

But she had chosen them over me. Stupid girl. She still could not see, her love for her people too strong to unchain her from the mortal realm. When she came to see sense we would reign like – well, like the gods we were, ruling over all. But she still saw herself as one of them.

“She will come to see reason,” I assured.

“And why do you think that? Women are a wily and sinister race.”

“Not she. And I know because she is my wife. She will rejoin me. It is her place to be by my side.”

And she would be by my side now, not behind. No longer a pet. She had ascended to be worthy of an Asgardian, as strong as me – maybe even stronger, though she lacked the experience to use the power given to her.

She had been so beautiful. A creature of light and life, radiating with a beauty I had not before imagined. She was an angel. Still I could see her, glowing with the light of a thousand snows, her skin shimmering like celestial ice. She was the perfect queen for a creature such as I, a frost giant, my opposite in every way yet still a creature of the winter.

We would dwell in winter together once she was returned to me, turning away the garish light of the sun and the unforgiving heat of summer. We would live together in the merciful cold, filled with delicate spires of ice and the hushed whispers of snowfall.

“Your words better be true, Frost Giant, or else it shall be you that I shall smite before the realm of earth.”

“She will return,” I said softly, looking outside. Above I could see the stars shining over earth, watching where we hid with a million hateful eyes. I stepped back into the shadows, away from their resentful glare.

“She will return,” I repeated, “for it is her destiny.”



I don’t know when I finally drifted off, collapsing in my own bed where I could hopefully have some privacy. All I knew that at some point I was roused at some ungodly hour by the feeling of something pressing against my side. I jolted awake but stopped suddenly, my panic turning into pleasure. I took her hands in mine and laughed, my voice hoarse with sleep.

“Welcome home, Pepper,” I said, smiling. “Sorry, I threw a party with my friends while you were away.”

“As long as you clean the house,” she replied. She pressed her lips softly to mine and I wrapped my arms around her. She was warm and soft and tasted of cherries and coffee. I ran my fingers through her thick hair and breathed her in deeply, finally letting her go. She rested her forehead against mine, smiling.

“I’m going to marry you one day,” I said, putting my hand against her cheek. Her blue eyes looked lazily into mine, a smile playing at her lips.

“I hope sooner than later,” she said, her tone low and conspiratorial. She bit her lip as I ran my fingers over her neck.

“Oh? How about tomorrow. I could have a wedding tomorrow,” I replied. “I’m sure we could find you a dress. And I have a suit.”

She laughed. “A little too spontaneous, Tony.”

“Why? I thought every girl had their dress picked out by the time they were twelve. C’mon. I can pay for it. Let’s get married tomorrow. Hell, let’s get married today.”

“And what about your business partners?” she asked, running her hands over my chest in a way that made my mind wander to interesting places. “Won’t they feel jilted that they didn’t get invited?”

“They’ll recover. C’mon. Marry me.”

“We’re not even engaged, Tony,” she laughed.

I looked around, staring at the ceiling.

“Hey, Jarvis, do we have any engagement rings handy?” I called to him.

“I do not believe so, sir.”

“Get me one. Soon as possible. Something big and shiny with a big sparkly rock at its center.”

“Very well, sir. I can have the ring here by tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Hell, Jarvis, I want it now.”

“Sir, the cost to get that kind of object here in under an hour would be –“

“Pay it and send out a drone to pick it up. I want it within the hour. No, the half hour.”

“Very well, sir.”

Pepper curled up on the bed next to me, laughing. Her cute nose wrinkled up and she gripped my arm, shifting on top of the sheets.

“Are you serious?” she asked, still smiling.

“Dead serious. That ring is going to get here and I am going to propose to you. All the bells and whistles. Then we’ll get married tomorrow. How does that sound?”

“A bit… rushed, I think,” Pepper replied, but she was still smiling. She traced her finger over my collarbone, eyes lowered.

“But I think it’s for the best,” she added softly after, her eyes slowly lifting to meet mine. I turned to her, raising an eyebrow.

“Why? Is something wrong?” I asked. She smiled shaking her head.

“No, not wrong. Well, maybe. I don’t know. I was nervous, and I really didn’t know what to do, but it’s a really good thing – it might also be a bad thing, but I just don’t know, I’ve debated telling you for the last couple weeks because we’ve both been so busy –“

“Pepper.”

She looked back up at me, face growing sober.

“I’m pregnant.”

I was expecting to be terrified the first time I heard this. Hell, I was expecting to be angry, even. But all I felt was shock and an unexplainable, wild, crazy elation that seemed to turn my bones weightless and lift all the pain off my mind. I started laughing – then I laughed harder, so hard until it grew hard to breathe. Finally I grabbed Pepper and kissed her, feeling tears begin to stream down my cheeks. She began to laugh and cry, too, wrapping her arms around my neck.

“How long?” I asked, looking at her. “How long has it been?”

“Remember the night before you finished Stark Tower?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it was then.”

So the baby was already a good eight weeks along. Wow. In eight months – no less than eight months – I was going to have a kid. That was terrifying.

That was incredible.

I cradled the woman of my dreams in my arms, her head resting lightly on my shoulder. She laughed and sighed, her arm draped over my waist.

“So, which one do you think the kid will learn to do first: walk or fly the Mark 14?”

“Tony, we’re not giving our baby a suit.”

“Why? We can be the Iron Family. They’ll make a reality TV show about us. I’ll make you a suit, too. I already was working on one.”

“Oh really?”

“I actually finished it. Then I lent it to Dove and she kind of fell and crashed –“

“Dove?” Pepper asked, immediately sitting up and looking at me. “Is she okay? Tony, the poor girl has already died once. We don’t need her dying again.”

“Well, she died again –“

“What?”

“- but she was resurrected as a demigod so it’s all okay.”

Pepper just stared at me, not saying anything. Finally she sighed, patting my stomach and shaking her head.

“I’m not even going to ask. Is she okay at least? I still haven’t met her.”

“She’s okay. A bit damaged, but she’ll pull through.”

Pepper laughed, standing. “Oh, by the way, I saw Natasha was here.”

“With her super-secret agent boyfriend. She’s safe now.”

“Really? I didn’t know she was seeing anyone.”

“That’s okay, neither does she.”

Pepper laughed again as I stood. She wound her fingers in mine.

“Well, you’ll have to point him out to me,” she replied.

A loud, chime-like beep came through a monitor in the room. Something had entered my lab.

“Oh look, I think your ring is here,” I said, smiling. I wrapped an arm around Pepper’s shoulders and led her downstairs, leaving everyone else asleep on the living room couches while I proposed in quiet.



It was a few hours before dawn when I first started feeling sick. I quietly got up and went to the bathroom in quiet, luckily making it far away and to a toilet before I threw up. I remained on the bathroom floor for a long time, feeling shaky and sick for a long time before I got up and flushed the contents of my stomach down the drain. I glanced at a hall clock as I passed: four thirty-six AM on September sixteenth, two-thousand and twelve.

I blinked at the clock. My twenty-third birthday had gone by a week ago and I hadn’t even known.

The rolling feeling returned to my stomach as I walked down the hall. I leaned against the wall, burying my head against my arm and closing my eyes. The power under my skin shifted and popped, unsettled by my wildly-swinging body signals.

What was wrong with me?

My eyes snapped open. I had a sinking feeling that I knew what was wrong, but I just couldn’t face it right now. I couldn’t. It couldn’t be possible.

I returned to the room where the others sat or stood, curling up upon myself in a corner for more than an hour. I asked for a drink, but finally I couldn’t control my anxiety and I got up, going to the balcony.

“I’m going flying.”

“Mark 13 is downstairs.”

“I don’t need the Mark 13 anymore, Tony.”

I launched myself into the air and left, wings spread.

Luckily most of the town was still asleep when I came in for a landing. I landed in a loading station behind a Wal-Mart Superstore and circled around, going in. I felt strange in my S.H.I.E.L.D uniform, but even so I was garnering more strange looks than I expected.

Only then did I notice a peculiar, naked sensation upon my back: I looked behind and realized that my wings had torn open large holes in my shirt. This was the reason people were looking at me so strangely. I altered my original course and went to the women’s clothing section, grabbing a basic white halter shirt that would hopefully create enough space for my sets of wings without ripping apart the fabric. Only after I’d gone to the cash register once, paying with a twenty I had found mercifully lost under Tony’s bar, and gone to the bathroom to change, did I return to my previous path: proceeding to the personal health section, I moved through the aisles of drugs and condoms until I found what I was looking for: a cheap pregnancy test, the kind you sneak into a bathroom in shame and pee on until the stick changes colors.

I purchased the little white device, ignoring the look of the old cashier who smelled of cigarette smoke and wore bright purple eye shadow. I walked into the bathroom, beginning to wish I had used my money to instead buy a hoodie that I could pull up over my face. I locked myself in a stall, tearing the damn thing out of its box and performing the test. Then I waited, the whole two to five minutes for the color to change.

As I was standing there I realized: I was a god. A god of the universe, gifted with powers beyond all mortal imagination. I had overcome death to come back as a higher being.

And I was spending the first hours of godhood locked away in a dingy bathroom in a Wal-Mart, staring helplessly at a pregnancy test.

When it finally did change I just stood there for a while. Then I threw the thing away, washing my hands before scrounging around and looking for what was left of the twenty. Three dollars. I ran back to the cashier that smelled of cigarettes, grabbing another test along the way and shoving the money in her hand.

“I’ seen that face before,” the woman croaked, taking my money. “You done been knocked up.”

I ignored her, returning to the bathroom and performing the test again. Another torturous two minutes.

Another equally torturous result.

I, a now-immortal, godlike being, crumbled onto the Wal-Mart bathroom floor like any very mortal, very human girl, feeling tears burn hot on my cheeks as I stared at that goddamn pink plus sign.

Loki had won. I was pregnant.